Guild Wars 2

Currently when selling an item on the TP you have three options.

a) enter a custom price
b) match the current lowest price
c) match any of your currently listed items

I’d like to propose a 4th options called “undercut” that will automatically list your item for 99% of the current lowest price. So essentially it’s 1% cheaper than what’s currently listed.

Pros:
-It’s convenient
-It reduces the amount of 1 Copper undercuts
-It encourages reaching the perfect market price

You’d still have the option to enter a custom price if you wanted (although maybe there should be a required 1% price-difference) so the feature would be mainly for convenience.

Example: You’re in an instance and want to sell some loot that’s filling up your inventory. You load the Trade Post and want to dump some Mithril. Mithril is currently listed at 35 Copper so the “undercut” option would list your stock for 34 Copper without the need for manual pricing.

I do think undercutting should be a sell option. However given the range of prices that items can be, a flat percentage is bad without sensible caps. In fact any required increment for undercutting is bad, as it effectively promotes excessive undercutting while causing some sensible undercutters to not undercut at all. While it’s fine to be annoyed by 1c undercuts, there’s actually nothing wrong with them economically (if you get undercut, it makes no difference to you by how much), and a lot that can go wrong with forcing higher amounts.

People would cry way more if instead of undercutting by 1c on a 150 gold item it was 1% each time.

150g
148.5
147.015
145.5448
144.0894
142.6485
141.2220
139.80980

Seven people undercut the original price and each other and the price drops by just over 10g. Guess what, sell orders went down. Average price dropped dramatically. Perceived value tanked. Yours at 150g is way less likely to sell because people will start thinking of it as worth ~140g instead. It keeps going obviously.

Great. Another way to have uncaring people who won’t do the math to figure out the math to at least break even at the market a way to make loss leaders even faster across all goods. No thank you.

Yeah, except in a few situations, the time it takes to manually enter the numbers is currently the only reason not to undercut. This would mean that people selling junk in their bags would just hit undercut as well, and bring the WHOLE low price market down to vendor value.

No. No no no.

I don’t see how a quick undercut option would improve the situation compared with just matching the lowest seller now.
Sure, if you match you have to wait a bit before stuff sells, but if everyone hits undercut in a hurry, you will be waiting longer and get less for your stuff.

And really, if you’re in a rush to sell because your fractal group wants to push on, you’re not going to pick up the cash in 1 minute anyway, so why not match the lowest and pick up the cash later?

The problem with goods (assuming not junk) being sold at a loss is because people are manually undercutting with stupid amounts. IMO having a sensible default undercut (which could even be 1c) would encourage people not to type in their own amounts, and is a net positive in terms of keeping prices stable.

Stuff that IS junk, is junk. Those prices are low because few people want them and the sellers are just dumping items by remote. Are you really going to fret over a few coppers for selling junk when you could have the convenience of a one-click option for selling? It’s a value judgment but I’d take the convenience. Remember we are talking about undercutting. Why pay a listing fee to put your junk item in a queue and risk it not selling when your potential gain for doing it is 1c?

You guys don’t sound like undercutters to me, you sound like the people who hate getting undercut.

You might as well give the economy training wheels.